Sending Shopify customer groups to Klaviyo or Mailchimp

Knowing who your Best Customers and At Risk customers are is only half the job. The other half is getting those groups into the email tool you already use, so the right people get the right message.

Three ways to do it

1. Build the segments inside your email tool

Klaviyo and Mailchimp both connect to Shopify and can import customers and orders. You can then build segments with conditions like “placed order at least 3 times” and “last order more than 120 days ago”.

This works, but you have to design every rule yourself, and the rules drift away from how your store actually buys over time.

2. Export and import a CSV

Calculate groups in a spreadsheet (or with our RFM calculator), export a CSV with email addresses and a group column, and import it as a list or with tags.

Fine for a one-off campaign. The problem is that the groups are frozen on the day of the import, while your customers keep moving between them.

3. Sync groups from an app

A customer app calculates the groups and pushes them to your email tool as tags, and updates them on each sync. This is what WinBack does: connect Klaviyo or Mailchimp with an API key, pick the groups, and each customer arrives tagged with their group and VIP Level. It is on the Shopify App Store if you want to try it.

How tags work

Tags are labels on a contact. In Mailchimp you can target a campaign to everyone with a tag. In Klaviyo, contacts synced with properties or list membership can be used to build segments. A useful tagging pattern:

• One tag for the group, for example Best Customers or At Risk
• One tag for value, for example VIP Platinum

Then a campaign can target “At Risk AND VIP Platinum”: your most valuable customers who are slipping away.

Consent comes first

Only email people who agreed to receive marketing. Shopify stores each customer’s email marketing consent, and a good sync respects it:

• Customers who said yes are added as subscribers.
• Customers who did not say yes should not be subscribed. They can be stored in your email tool for reference, but must not receive campaigns.

Getting this wrong is not just a deliverability problem; in many countries it is a legal one.

Campaign ideas per group

Keep the groups fresh

Whichever method you choose, refresh the groups before every campaign. A customer who was At Risk last month and ordered yesterday should not get a “we miss you” email today.